I found a new search engine called "hakia" that seems not to be worse than Google and seems to be better at handling natural questions (such as "How to stream flash video from website?", "How to find the age of the universe?", etc.)

So, if you search for information a lot, you might find this useful. You can see the examples above the search box for more ideas.

Thursday, May 17, 2007

A good friend of mine asked me what evidences I have for my belief in the idea that all living things on earth have common ancestors. This is an excellent question since it's very important to base our judgement about reality on good evidences, or we can easily be led astray by our commonsense, biases, and other extremely appealing ideas that don't match reality.*

My specific belief is this: All living things on Earth descend from one or small number of groups of ancestors. (I would like to say one group, but I'm open to the possibility that there are unknown life forms that have independent ancestors, distinct from our group.)

Another implication that if there are extra-terrestrial beings (which I really hope there are, although I don't have any evidence for that yet) it's very unlikely for them to look very similar to us. Even if we and ET have the same common ancestors, that ancestors must have come to earth billions of years ago and will have enough time to evolve into us and myriads forms of animals and plants. Similarly, the ET would descend from the common ancestors over the similarly long time period. So, Captain Kirk in Star Trek should not be able to mate with those ET chicks if he is not really, really into inter-planetary bestiality. (Same reasoning applies to Superman and Lois Lane.**)

Yet another implication is that human is not the apex of evolution. There will be other lifeforms in the billions of years ahead if we don't destroy all life first. We are the first Earth lifeform that can destroy all life on Earth using our technology, but we are not necessarily the best lifeform. To think that we are the peak of all possible lifeforms is just extremely arrogant.

Finally, my body is made of atoms from things (living/dead, never-alive) from the past. Therefore, I also believe that when I die, some atoms that used to be me will be recycled into other living things in the future but the atoms won't carry any of my memory there, since my memory is not stored in specific atoms, but in the patterns of how atoms are arranged. This is supported by the fact that, atoms inside my bodies are very likely to have been in bodies of people of the past, yet I don't share their memory. Conversely, with very high probability, atoms that are in my body now weren't the same atoms that were in my body when I was a child, yet I still remember many things from my childhood. This gives me a hope that, in principle, human can preserve identity/memory by capturing the memory patterns and upload them to more permanent substrate and become relatively immortal.

--- - ---- - ----- ---------* The great Richard Feynman summed it up (in this book) thus: "... there are many reasons why you might not understand [an explanation of a scientific theory] ... Finally, there is this possibility: after I tell you something, you just can't believe it. You can't accept it. You don't like it. A little screen comes down and you don't listen anymore. I'm going to describe to you how Nature is - and if you don't like it, that's going to get in the way of your understanding it. It's a problem that [scientists] have learned to deal with: They've learned to realize that whether they like a theory or they don't like a theory is not the essential question. Rather, it is whether or not the theory gives predictions that agree with experiment. It is not a question of whether a theory is philosophically delightful, or easy to understand, or perfectly reasonable from the point of view of common sense. [A scientific theory] describes Nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense. And it agrees fully with experiment. So I hope you can accept Nature as She is - absurd.

I'm going to have fun telling you about this absurdity, because I find it delightful. Please don't turn yourself off because you can't believe Nature is so strange. Just hear me all out, and I hope you'll be as delighted as I am when we're through."

Lately, religious fundamentalists of all types are trying to force schools in many countries to either stop teaching evolution as an explanation of how life and species were formed, or to spend equal time teaching nonsense that is amply contradicted by evidences.

The book that changed my view of how the world came to be is The Blind Watchmaker, by Richard Dawkins. I read it when I was 19 and I'm so glad I did. Dawkins wrote in the book: "I want to persuade the reader, not just that the Darwinian world-view happens to be true, but that it is the only known theory that could, in principle, solve the mystery of our existence."

You can learn more about the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster here (Wikipedia), here (Uncyclopedia), and here (the official website.)

Tuesday, May 08, 2007

I am very interested in this article proposing that appropriate nuclear fission reactors (fast reactors) can provide all the energy we will foreseeably need.

I'm brushing up my rusty nuclear physics knowledge to see if it's plausible.

The abstract reads:

"Nuclear fission energy is as inexhaustible as those energies usually termed "renewable", such as hydro, wind, solar, and biomass. But, unlike the sum of these energies, nuclear fission energy has sufficient capacity to replace fossil fuels as they become scarce. Replacement of the current thermal variety of nuclear fission reactors with nuclear fission fast reactors, which are 100 times more fuel efficient, can dramatically extend nuclear fuel reserves. The contribution of uranium price to the cost of electricity generated by fast reactors, even if its price were the same as that of gold at US$14,000/kg, would be US$0.003/kWh of electricity generated. At that price, economically viable uranium reserves would be, for all practical purposes, inexhaustible. Uranium could power the world as far into the future as we are today from the dawn of civilization—more than 10,000 years ago. Fast reactors have distinct advantages in siting of plants, product transport and management of waste."I have a bias in that I really want solar (thermal and electric) energy to succeed because Thailand has plenty of sun light. Also, we would be using the Sun as our nuclear (fusion) reactor situated 150,000,000 km away instead of a nuclear (fission) reactor a few tens to hundreds km away. However, if this fast reactor approach is feasible and safe enough, it deserves serious consideration for future energy production.

Wednesday, May 02, 2007

This IBM's report indicates that their scientists used the 4096-processor BlueGene/L supercomputer to simulate 8 million neurons of mouse brain with 6,300 synapses per neuron at 1/10 the real-time speed.

Human brain has about 100,000 million neurons, so there is a factor of 12,500 in the number of neurons to go, and a factor of 10 for the simulation speed. Let's say we need 1,000,000 times more computing power to simulate the human brain in real time, that will take only 20 doublings in processing power to achieve. Therefore, a supercomputer in 20-30 years might be able to simulate a human brain!

Further understanding of how the states of the brain are stored in neuron configurations, and how to read the state of a living human and upload the state to the simulator would be the limiting steps in our ability to backup our brain states.

Hopefully, in the next few decades, nanotech + biotech will allow us to either repair our biological body or build a more durable artificial body for our backup brain states.

I think if I can live another 40-50 years, I will be able to upload and backup myself repeatedly to live for a really long time.

I might as well dream a little bit more. I might even download my brain to a diplodocus body with Titus in an allosaurus body and we can really walk with the dinosaurs. Maybe I can live for a while in a plesiosaur body to reduce my fear of the ocean. :-)